If you were to take an informal poll of any Hebrew school class and ask the kids what is their favorite holiday, most would say Hanukkah. The lure of presents is great. Nothing beats using a flame to light the menorah. And who can resist the chance to gamble with dreidel games?

Some kids even might say their favorite holiday is Purim, which can be like a Jewish Halloween, complete with a carnival, costumes and noisemakers.

Some might say Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

During my years of Jewish education, and even now, I was the odd kid out. Passover always has been my favorite holiday.

Those who have read my articles for The Denver Post’s Food section may think that’s because of the special dishes that make an appearance at the Passover seder. But my love for the holiday runs deeper than my love for matzo ball soup. It’s the idea of storytelling that connects me to Passover the most.

I was born into a family of storytellers. On my father’s side, I’m a third-generation journalist. My father’s mother, Freda Feldman, was a journalist in Atlantic City, N.J. My dad worked as a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman in the ’60s.

My mother worked as a junior-high school Spanish and French teacher and as a children’s librarian in a St. Louis suburb and in San Antonio. She always has used storytelling to captivate children, to inspire them to read, to illustrate the power of a good story.

Passover has a great story, an epic that is the stuff of movies: oppression. A burning bush. A man being tapped by God to save a race. Plagues. Running from the bad guy. Finding freedom.

Every year, “The Ten Commandments,” with Charlton Heston as Moses is aired, but ABC is remaking the story this year into a two-part miniseries. According to ABC’s website, “The Ten Commandments” unfolds with all the spectacle, violent human drama and grand inspiration that has earned its stature as the greatest story ever told.”

Passover is an extended story hour, or longer, depending on how devout the participants are. Our family seders, however, were always fast-paced and kid-friendly. My father would be the leader, and you would often hear him say, “OK, so we saw the movie. Let’s skip to page 23.”

But Passover employs an amazing device that encourages participation in the storytelling, as it includes its participants in the action. It’s not about what happened to the Israelites as they fled Egypt, rather it is what happened as we ran from Pharaoh’s armies.

By placing ourselves in the story, it makes Passover even more important. We’re invested from the beginning. We realize that had we been there, enslaved, and had we not done anything about it, we wouldn’t be sitting, as Jews, at the seder now.

As I got older, I found myself even more connected to Passover. Part of this, I think, is due to the text we used during the seder. In the late ’80s, my parents upgraded their Haggadah, the prayerbook used during the seder. For years, we had used the Maxwell House freebies found in the grocery store’s coffee aisle, a standard text in many Jewish households.

During a trip to Beverly Hills one year to visit my aunt and uncle, my mom visited the place where my Uncle Jerry worked, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, or “Temple to the Stars” as she liked to call it. While there, she found a Haggadah that she loved, “Festival of Freedom,” and bought a set for home.

It was at this time that I was studying to become a bat mitzvah, the rite of passage where I would be considered an adult in the eyes of the congregation.

This Haggadah made me realize that Passover was about symbolism and discussion. Each page included an “interpretation for discussion,” where you could deviate from the service and debate or discuss passages and historic events. It was here that I also learned the meanings behind certain customs, and saw that the prayerbook included gender-neutral language for God.

I learned that Judaism offered different things for different observers and that discussions at Passover varied. Over the years, debates about slavery in the United States, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, violence in the Middle East, the exodus of Russian and Ethopian Jews, genocide in Darfur and other current events have become melded into the seder.

Perhaps that’s what connects me most to Passover. As the world changes, the story of Passover remains the same, but the symbolism engrained in it evolves to reflect the world we live in. Every spring, we go back to the time when were enslaved in Egpyt, and every year we find ourselves fighting for our freedom. And every year, we are left with hope that injustice and suffering throughout the world will end.

What could be a better story?

Passover is staff writer Jacqueline Feldman’s favorite holiday.

Below she shares some of her family memories:

1. Israel

My father and I traveled to Israel in 1984 to celebrate Passover with his family. I had just turned 7 and had yet to experience a “by-the-book” seder.

My grandparents and Aunt Sharon moved to Israel in the late 1960s, due to their strong Zionist views. They were never very observant, unlike my Uncle David, who led the seder, which took place in the living room at my grandparent’s flat.

My grandfather, who was hospitalized that week because of a kidney infection, received a day pass from the hospital so he could attend the seder, but a condition of his release included wearing a catheter bag.

The seder table was pretty much divided into an us-versus-them situation. My father’s family sat at one end of the table, David and his family sat at the other end. My dad and grandmother kept cracking jokes about how long the seder would last because of David’s pacing. David kept scowling about the jokes.

We knew this, however. My grandfather was the only one who didn’t have to take a bathroom break during the seder.

2. Matzo switcheroo

During the seder, the leader breaks a piece of matzo and sets aside the afikomen, a piece that will be used for dessert. The leader will hide it, and children will search for it and then demand a ransom. The service following the meal cannot commence until the afikomen is returned to the leader.

In our house, finding the afikomen was a big deal. Dad would give $2 bills as ransom money.

One year, however, he decided to trick instead of treat us.

I found the afikomen a bit too easily, and sat smugly at the table as I counted my earnings in my head. As he called for the afikomen, I began to barter, but found I didn’t have the upper hand in the negotiation process. Turns out, he had the afikomen all along, and I had a piece of cardboard wrapped in a napkin. He pulled a switcheroo, hiding two pieces of afikomen. … one real, and one fake.

3. On this night, we recline. … Some more than others

On Passover, we are told to recline while eating, as we were not able to do so as slaves. In 1995, my dad took this to the extreme: he threw out his back the first night of Passover. He spent the seder in bed.

I became the leader for the first time that night. I tried to employ dad’s technique of “You saw the movie, you know the story, let’s skip ahead,” but I must have covered more ground than he usually did. Every so often, we’d hear him call from the bedroom “Is it dinner yet?”

4. A Passover Odyssey

I hosted my first seder in 2001 at my house with my friend Sara, whom I met while teaching at Temple Emmanuel. I learned firsthand how difficult it is to prepare a meal. We invited friends to join us at seder, and a majority of them were not Jewish. Both devout fans of the Haggadah our families used, we worked to combine the two into a cohesive service, but one that non-Jews would understand. The evening went off without a hitch, and it served as a great birthday party for me, too.

5. A new family affair

Last year, I spent my first Passover with my boyfriend and we made traditional Passover foods together, including gefilte fish, matzo ball soup and brisket. I realized just how progressive the Haggadah my family used is, as we reverted to the Maxwell House Haggadah during the seder. I served as the leader, because I somehow was the most qualified, according to our participants. I spent a good portion of the seder trying to rewrite the wording of the Haggadah, making it more gender-neutral and less sexist. Great discussions ensued and we learned much about each other, our views about Judaism and the role it plays in our lives.

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